Peter De Vries once observed that “comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.” Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy. The determination and artistry with which he approached these subjects made him hard to categorize, which may be why, little more than a decade after his death, he is pretty much forgotten—a sad note on which to begin.

De Vries was certainly a very funny man, consistently and inventively; a number of his coinages long ago found their uncredited way into the language, among them “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” and “Deep down, he’s shallow.” A half century ago, his first acknowledged novel, “The Tunnel of Love,” which became a Broadway play and a movie with Doris Day and Gig Young, made him moderately famous. On the basis of that and his next novel, a suburban comedy called “Comfort Me with Apples,” Kingsley Amis, in the Times, called De Vries “the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” Soon enough, reviewers were comparing him to Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ring Lardner, and Max Beerbohm—immensely gratifying judgments and helpful publisher’s blurbs, but somehow less than apt. Looking back at De Vries’s work (during nearly fifty years, he wrote some two dozen novels, along with parodies, poetry, short stories, and essays), one can see more clearly that his writing was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and by the idea, as he put it, that “the rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity.” And sometimes sorrow won out.

On the dust jacket of “Comfort Me with Apples” (1956) is a photograph of a smiling man with dark hair who appears to be in his mid-forties (De Vries was born in 1910), his arms crossed in a fashionable authorial pose. He’s wearing a dark tie and a checked tweed jacket, with a handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. At the lower left is a blond girl, his daughter Emily, who was then about six, looking pleased with herself, as if she had just sneaked into the picture. It’s the only dust-jacket photograph of the author in the company of someone else, and what is unsettling about this familial portrait is our knowledge that four years later Emily would be dead, of leukemia.

If it is difficult to think about Peter De Vries without his puns and wisecracks, it is impossible to do so apart from this central event, or from “The Blood of the Lamb” (1961), his sixth novel, which deals with the death of a child; the descriptions of her sickness and dying are as unbearable as anything in modern literature. There were still bursts of laughter, although darker than in any other De Vries book. (At one point, the narrator’s father rants, “Black light! Antimatter! It’s all around us. We’re all headed for it!” and adds, “The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.”) But after that his fiction had another kind of mirthfulness. He remained a master of loopy plots and malapropisms—“I’ve been married seventeen years and never had an organism,” one character tells an advice columnist—and an observer of spoiled middle-class white America, a place populated by comfortable yet perpetually ill-at-ease heroes. But the word “humorist” no longer seemed exactly right.

I’ve recently immersed myself in De Vries’s books, and the temptation is to stop here for a bit and start repeating De Vriesisms, the written equivalent of nudging a companion as prelude to reading something aloud: “ ‘Ah, Tanglewood,’ I said, hunched over my plate. ‘The soft summer nights, the lovers strolling, the Brahms bursting in air.’ ” Or “ ‘So you’re the new personnel manager,’ I said, ogling her. ‘I trust you have a little opening for me.’ ” Then, there are the epigrams, such as “How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?” or “What I hate about writing is the paperwork.”

In the early books, one was carried along by De Vries’s unstoppable gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery, and his grandly silly dialogue. When a woman at a party refers to a “real sou’wester,” the narrator replies, “I’m from the Mi’est. . . . I went to Nor’estern.” And, later, “Have you ever been to We’inster A’ey?” His best sentences were dazzling, and his ear for bad prose was infallible. In “The Tents of Wickedness” (1959), his narrator falls into parodic reveries; in a Dreiser mood, for instance, he thinks, “Now it swept over him in a rushing billow of raw emotion that caused him to thrash on his seat what he wanted to do”; and, “He had not possessed her in the orthodoxly carnal sense, only lent his flesh objectively to her special purpose.” Because many of the writers parodied—John P. Marquand, for instance—are no longer much read, some of this today may seem a little puzzling. But it is hard to regard William Faulkner in quite the same way after you read about “locking her forever in that cloistral dream from which that sex who alone must waken her must by the same token be the one most powerless to deliver her.”

If humor is perishable—boy, is it perishable!—much of what De Vries wrote has a feeling of permanence; his antennae for absurdity and his verbal intelligence (like Nabokov, De Vries was reared listening to another language, the Dutch that his parents spoke) have outlasted the jokes. In many of his novels, he went over the territory explored by, among others, John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates—marriage and sex, work and family, and all the agonies and pleasures of suburban life in the twentieth century. He wrote about admen and furniture movers, writers, clergymen, and academics. De Vries’s men and women were not always perfectly drawn, but they were just as sad and baffled as, say, Cheever’s Neddy and Lucinda Merrill or Yates’s Frank and April Wheeler; the difference was that De Vries almost always made you laugh.

In 1964, in an interview for a series called “Counterpoint,” De Vries made this autobiographical declaration:

**{: .break one} ** I was born in Chicago in 1910 into a Dutch immigrant community which still preserved its old-world ways. My origins would have been little different had my parents never come to America at all, but remained in Holland. I still feel somewhat like a foreigner, and not only for ethnic reasons. Our insularity was two-fold, being a matter of religion as well as nationality. In addition to being immigrants, and not able to mix well with the Chicago Americans around us, we were Dutch Reformed Calvinists who weren’t supposed to mix—who, in fact, had considerable trouble mixing with one another. We were the elect, and the elect are barred from everything, you know, except heaven. **

Peter’s father hauled ice in the summer and coal in the winter and became a furniture mover; he eventually opened a warehouse business. He wanted his son to join the clergy, and sent him to Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, where he studied English and played basketball. After graduation, Peter returned to Chicago and sold candy on a vending-machine route. He worked for a small newspaper and acted on the radio, sometimes playing gangster parts and, at least once, a wounded gorilla. He also found part-time work, at twenty-five dollars a week, with the magazine Poetry—first as an associate editor, then as co-editor with the poet George Dillon. During the De Vries-Dillon era, the magazine published early work by, among others, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, and Karl Shapiro. (Dillon and De Vries were also among the first American editors to print poems by Dylan Thomas.) Between 1940 and 1944, De Vries also wrote three novels—“But Who Wakes the Bugler?” (illustrated by Charles Addams), “The Handsome Heart,” and “Angels Can’t Do Better,” all of which quickly went out of print and which he later refused to list with his other books, because he decided they were “not good enough.” In the fall of 1943, he married Katinka Loeser, a contributor to Poetry. Their courtship, according to his son Jon De Vries, probably formed the basis for the early chapters of his 1974 novel, “The Glory of the Hummingbird” (the title from the Eliot poem “Marina”), in which a young man embarrassed by his family commits a series of social blunders while courting a woman from Chicago’s Gold Coast.

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While De Vries was at Poetry, he wrote an admiring essay, “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock,” in which he seems to have been anticipating his future self. (In his novels, De Vries often referred to Eliot’s poetry, and his characters, when the mood struck, sometimes quoted it in a Chicago dialect.) “It is hard to think of anyone who more closely resembles the Prufrock of Eliot than the middle-aged man on the flying trapeze,” he wrote. “There is, for instance, the same dominating sense of Predicament. The same painful and fastidious self-inventory; the same detached anxiety; the same immersion in weary minutiae, the same self-disparagement, the same wariness of the evening’s company.”

Thurber, fifteen years older than De Vries, was flattered; he became a friend and promoter, and gave some of De Vries’s shorter pieces to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker. In June of 1944, Thurber wrote to De Vries, saying, “I had handed the whole sheaf of your stuff to Ross who had said, sighing, ‘I’ll read it, but it won’t be any good.’ Half hour later he called me in and said, ‘Jesus Christ. It is good!’ ” A job offer followed, and, in the late summer of 1944, Peter and Katinka moved to Greenwich Village.

The meeting with Ross, at the Algonquin, reads like an early De Vries story, and even if it’s not true, it has been repeated so often that one wants it to be. Ross, who thought that the name was French and pronounced it “DeVree,” asked De Vries if he could do the Race Track department, and De Vries replied, “No, but I can imitate a wounded gorilla.” To which Ross allegedly said, “Well, don’t imitate it around the office. The place is a zoo the way it is.”

The De Vrieses eventually settled in Westport, Connecticut; among their friends and neighbors were J. D. Salinger, Robert Penn Warren, and John Hersey. De Vries became an occasional contributor of New Yorker “casuals” (his first signed piece appeared in May of 1946), and for more than thirty years he worked part time as a cartoon doctor, improving captions and finding gags for artists—a practice that the magazine stopped some time ago. A collection of his short pieces, “No But I Saw the Movie,” came out in 1952, and two years later “The Tunnel of Love,” whose harebrained plot—of imagined and real adultery and the misfortunes of a gag writer who wants to be a full-fledged cartoonist—is narrated by someone who works at a magazine much like The New Yorker.

It was obvious from the start that De Vries was a student of comedy. Now and then, one of his characters, speaking for the author, would pronounce on the subject: “For with what does humor deal save with that which isn’t funny. Or at least isn’t funny at the time: broken bones, broken machinery, bad food, hangovers. Husbands. Wives. Brats.” A little later, he adds, “Tragedy and comedy have a common root, whose name at last I think I know. Desperation.”

Desperation—and the abject humiliation that often accompanies it—is perhaps the central ingredient in De Vries’s best books, beginning with “The Mackerel Plaza” (1958). His hero, the Reverend Andrew Mackerel, of the People’s Liberal Church, is a man of wavering faith who once preached, “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.” Mackerel is a widower (his wife died, possibly by foul play, in a boating accident), and he’s trying to publish a book with the title “Maturity Comes of Age.” As time goes by, he seems less to be in a state of mourning than in one of constant sexual longing. At one point, gazing upon a woman with whom he’s acquainted, he thinks:

**{: .break one} ** She was about twenty-five, and naked except for a green skirt and sweater, heavy brown tweed coat, shoes, stockings, and so forth, a scarf knotted at her throat and a brown beret. I regarded her breasts with melancholy, then my eyes began their ordained journey downward. **

“The Mackerel Plaza” was described by one reviewer as having “hasty characterizations and a plot that wouldn’t tax the imagination of a Cub Scout Den” (the reviewer nevertheless liked the book); and it certainly depended on the conventions of the time. When Mackerel is spotted at a seedy hotel, his reputation is nearly ruined by gossips. But it is a real novel, and Mackerel is a real character, for whom things get steadily worse, as they tend to do for the protagonists of De Vries’s fiction: Knopf rejects Mackerel’s book; his prospective mother-in-law believes that he’s a scoundrel; and he reaches a pinnacle of De Vriesian embarrassment when he’s arrested for fighting with a street preacher. There’s even a loss of faith, although Mackerel says, “It’s not such a tragedy. Like losing a wooden leg in an accident.”

“The Mackerel Plaza” was followed, the next year, by the parody-rich “Tents of Wickedness” and “Through the Fields of Clover,” a disjointed and dispirited generational saga, which was dedicated “To Emily with love.” By then, his daughter was mortally ill, and, in the summer of 1959, De Vries wrote to Salinger, “One trip through a children’s ward and if your faith isn’t shaken, you’re not the type who deserves any faith.” In what he calls a “half alcoholic screed,” he went on:

**{: .break one} ** I too have moments of faith, or assurance, or beauty—or maybe just lapses in nihilism. In the morning I’m capable of hearing the music of the spheres—it’s when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal nothingness. **

When “The Blood of the Lamb,” De Vries’s most autobiographical novel, was published, the year after Emily’s death, it came as a shock to his readers, accustomed by now to a few hours of amusement. Like De Vries, the narrator of “The Blood of the Lamb” was raised in Chicago in a strict religious family. There was more overlap with the author’s life: a stay at a sanatorium for tubercular patients, a father who went a little crazy, a sibling who died young. It was also a novel filled with the forebodings of its narrator, Don Wanderhope, about an ailing lover, about his Chicago family, and, finally, about his daughter:

**{: .break one} ** What, I thought to myself as I gazed at [her], if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle. **

The novel spills over with angry admonitions. Of a doctor treating his daughter, improvising chemotherapy in its infancy, Wanderhope asks, “Do you believe in God as well as play at him?” As the end draws near, he says, “So death by leukemia is now a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops. But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.”

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In no other novel was De Vries so personal, although, unlike his protagonist, a widower with one dying daughter, Peter and Katinka had three other children: two surviving sons—Jon and Derek—and a daughter, Jan, who died not long ago. And in no other novel did he speak so directly to his readers: “Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more than happiness. The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age. The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case.”

“The Blood of the Lamb” was followed by astonishing books, astonishing in their high and low comedy and in their rich assortment of De Vries types: “Reuben, Reuben,” “Let Me Count the Ways,” “The Vale of Laughter,” “The Cat’s Pajamas,” and “Witch’s Milk.” These novels were complex and ambitious; it was as if De Vries wanted to announce a final break from the community of American humor writers like Benchley, Perelman, and his beloved Thurber, with whom he had often been grouped.

“Reuben, Reuben,” published three years after “The Blood of the Lamb,” was twice as long as any earlier De Vries novel; it had three interlocking sections, the best of these narrated by a not quite literate Connecticut chicken farmer named Frank Spofford. Spofford, who has literary ambitions and reflects that the purpose of art is “to exercise the ghost of something,” gave De Vries a voice to let loose on all sorts of things, such as the changes he didn’t like in his adopted home town, a place “filling up rapidly with ish women and sortof men”—women who make appointments for “five-ish” and their mates. The Spoffords are the natives; they refuse to sell their chickens to commuters, especially those who drive Jaguars and live in fancy Punch Bowl Hollow; they don’t bend even when one commuter’s wife pleads, “My husband gets off at Stamford.” After all, as a Spofford family member points out, “If you let them have any they’ll only cook them in red wine.” Spofford, though, becomes entranced by the social scene, by two women named Pussy, and by a Scottish poet named Gowan McGland, who is loosely based on Dylan Thomas and sounds at times a good deal like De Vries. (Swinburne’s poetry, McGland says, “always reminds me of the work of some young punk who has just read Swinburne.”)

Four more novels appeared in the space of just four years, and Derek De Vries recalls the sound of clacking typewriters in Westport, a “stereo effect,” as his father and mother wrote at opposite ends of the house. Katinka Loeser’s short stories were admired and published in several collections; her fictional account of Emily’s death, “Whose Little Girl Are You?,” appeared in The New Yorker at about the time of “The Blood of the Lamb.”

De Vries would sometimes revisit favored phrases. Gowan McGland, mulling the meaning of life, mutters, “Nobody will ever figure it out. The combination is locked up inside the safe,” and Stanley Waltz, in “Let Me Count the Ways” (1965), perfects the line: “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.” His central characters were becoming ever more hapless—Joe Sandwich, in “The Vale of Laughter” (1967), is a stockbroker with a reputation for recommending what “are known in the trade as laughing stocks”—and in 1968 he told an interviewer, “Why do we have to choose between cursing the gloom and lighting a candle? Why not a little of both?” That was the year he published “The Cat’s Pajamas” and “Witch’s Milk,” his shortest books, bound together. Their sales disappointed Little, Brown, his publisher, which blamed their brevity, and some critics were mystified (“What do we say?” Hugh Kenner, in a somewhat mean-spirited review in the Times, asked). If comic, why so bleak? And, if bleak, why all the jokes? These novels were probably his masterpieces.

The hero of “The Cat’s Pajamas,” a jaded English professor, is introduced in characteristic De Vries fashion:

**{: .break one} ** Tattersall’s most embarrassing moment was one for which any newspaper running such a feature would probably have paid the standard fee, but which he himself would gladly have given his life’s savings to have been spared. It was the autumn Homecoming at his college, Chichester. He was attending an afternoon musicale, one of the campus events arranged for the weekend, when he became annoyed by a woman whispering behind him. He turned and glared over his shoulder at her—to find himself looking straight into the eye of an old flame. **

For Hank Tattersall, the sensation was “like falling through ice into boiling water,” and it gets no better. His old flame’s husband is an advertising man, who tempts Tattersall to leap from academe to Madison Avenue. Tattersall’s inspiration is the “commercial of the Absurd,” inspired by Beckett and Ionesco: “Are you tired of detergents that don’t get your wash really white? Light up a Kent.” Eventually, Tattersall, well along the road to self-destruction, finds himself composing an endless commercial that asks, “Have you, along with the late Isak Dinesen, come to see man as an exquisite instrument for converting vintage claret into urine?” Toward the unnerving finale (by now the ruined Tattersall is living with an idiot child and an alcoholic dog), he briefly encounters a social worker named Tillie Shilepsky, through whom De Vries connects “The Cat’s Pajamas” to “Witch’s Milk.”

In “Witch’s Milk” (a movie version, “Pete ’n’ Tillie,” starred Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau), De Vries revisited almost every recurring nightmare of his earlier fiction, including the death of a child. Pete Seltzer, a skilled doubletalker who calls himself “a sonofabitch manqué,” is a charming guy, but one mostly roots for Tillie, who has the misfortune of falling for him. Pete, like his creator (De Vries was called Pete by friends), is absorbed by language and its possibilities, slipping at times into Jabberwockian meditations:

**{: .break one} ** They would imagine themselves to be the first family, commissioned by the Almighty the great task of nomenclature. There were no names for anything yet, in Paradise. What would they call those things with spreading boughs? The creatures twittering among them? The beasts whose skins they wore and whose haunches they gnawed as they squatted around the first of human fires, in the semantic dawn? Their yard became full of quormels and sleeths and whappinstances, all flumping through the sweem, or manganating in the queeglestocks. **

“Witch’s Milk” covered an astounding range of character and emotion in just a hundred and fifteen pages—at which point Tillie is grateful to Pete for seeing her through “the disillusionments of marriage”—and in it De Vries may have reached the perfect balance of comedy and despair.

After that, De Vries’s best work was behind him, although there were terrific sections in many of the dozen novels that followed—especially the first half of “The Glory of the Hummingbird.” (The book was disastrously padded, at the urging of his editor at Little, Brown, who told De Vries, “Whoever heard of a novel 114 pages long? Whaddya trying to do, write ‘Love Story’? . . . Is there any chance of lengthening this without destroying it?”) But more often, by the late seventies, De Vries was repeating himself, and seemed less familiar with his own characters and with the world beyond Westport, which itself was no longer the same. His first-person narrators remained in many ways the children of Midwestern Calvinists, sometimes barely able to finish an adulterous liaison or even to stick with a divorce. At the same time, there was an increasing, sometimes obsessive interest in sex, though he was usually funny about it: in “Madder Music,” after many episodes of athletic adultery, his unfaithful narrator confesses, “She’s a great lay, but she needs an editor.”

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To the end, De Vries kept on being incorrect, amusing, and quotable. There are probably writers who ought to count themselves lucky that he didn’t do literary criticism—not when he could write a mock reader’s report saying, “Every sentence [is] like a mother cat nursing a litter of cozily squirming subordinate clauses.” But the jokes did not seem so spontaneous, and it didn’t help his reputation that these later novels were often overpraised, which may have had the unintended effect of persuading new readers not to bother and encouraging older ones to wonder why they loved his work in the first place.

De Vries never had much of a public face and probably subscribed to the observation he’d made in “The Mackerel Plaza”: “One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.” Before he began to be recognized by the residents of Westport, he would sometimes wander about and stand in front of storefronts, a blank look on his face. He was eavesdropping, according to his son Jon, picking up conversations for his fiction. He was markedly shy; he hated speaking in public and wouldn’t appear on television, although he was invited by Johnny Carson. “He told me, ‘Do you want me to come home in a bag?’ ” Jon recalled.

In the early sixties, a journalist asked De Vries for help in arranging an interview with Salinger, who by then had moved to New Hampshire and was determined to avoid all such encounters. De Vries refused and wrote back, saying, “But why do I limit my feeling to solicitude for Salinger’s privacy? After other sorties than your own in recent weeks, by way of my telephone and mailbox, my mood has shifted rather to a concern for my own.” He wanted the correspondent to understand the “lust for privacy of some people, and the horror of interrogation.” And he recalled a line of Kafka’s that Salinger had once quoted, about what “a writer himself does when encouraged to flap away: ‘He begins to talk a stench.’ ” To a question about the “wellsprings of humor,” De Vries went on, a little impatiently:

**{: .break one} ** I cannot honestly recall or retrace the conception or development of a single comedic idea I ever had or developed. They vanish from memory after they are written out. Don’t ask a cow to analyze milk. One sits in a corner and secretes the stuff. One— But you see how right Kafka is? You have lured me into using the word “comedic,” which makes me sick. **

De Vries apparently always had a lingering sense of dread. His daughter Jan once gave him a set of oils, and he painted a tiny man surrounded by enormous dark clouds. At The New Yorker, where he continued to show up a couple of days a week until the early eighties, he is recalled as a tall, quiet, witty man, who usually ate lunch by himself—often at the Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth Street, close to the magazine’s former offices. Jon remembers going to clean out his father’s office at about that time and finding what he called “the uniform”—a tan London Fog raincoat—hanging by the door. “It was there when I got there,” his father told him.

His last novel, “Peckham’s Marbles,” came out in 1986, and after that he stopped publishing altogether. It was as if he knew he was saying goodbye to his readers in that novel’s Gatsby-like concluding lines: “For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore.” Katinka Loeser died in 1991, and a Westport friend, Max Wilk, recalls that De Vries became something of a recluse in the two years before his death, on September 28, 1993. All his books are out of print—a gloomy fact of modern literary life.

“Nonsense is such a difficult art!” De Vries once wrote, and to contemporary readers he is in many ways a mystifying figure, perhaps because he used laughter to disguise so much while letting so much poke through—especially his feelings of desolation and his sense of foreboding. In a letter to Thurber after Emily’s death, he wrote:

**{: .break one} ** Your words are of the kind that remind us that words are not necessary, that we are all side by side through all these things without it having to be said. We needn’t look far for the cue to courage. When Emily no longer had any spine left she supported herself on her sternum. We can do no less. We all have to climb out of the pit of desolation, or what is more likely, manage to live in it, planting our flowers among the ashes and squirting them with our gaiety. **

“The Blood of the Lamb” was dedicated to his three surviving children—“Jan, Jonny and Derek.” After that, the dedication page in his novels was left blank. ♦